His smile had vanished, and Reynaud leaned forward in his chair as the physicist's unexpectedly serious tone registered.

"There may?"

"It's too early to be certain, and I hope to God I can keep the bureaucrats out from underfoot while we follow up on it, but I think we may actually be about to crack the locus on the seventh terminus."

"You're joking!"

"No, I'm not." Kare shook his head vigorously. "The numbers are very preliminary, Mike, and we're still a huge distance from nailing down a definitive volume. Even after we do that, of course, we're going to be looking at the better part of a solid T-year, more probably two or three of them, before we get any farther than this end of the string. But unless I'm very mistaken, we've finally correlated enough sensor data to positively state that there actually is a seventh terminus to the Junction."

"My God," Reynaud said quietly. He leaned back once more and shook his head. "I hope you won't take this the wrong way, Jordin, but I never really expected us to find it. It just seemed so unlikely after all these years."

"It's been a bear," Kare agreed, "and I can see at least half a dozen monographs coming out of the hunt for it—probably more. You know the original theoretical math was always highly ambiguous, and it's only been in the last fifteen or twenty T-years that we've had Warshawskies sensitive enough to collect the observational data we needed to confirm it. And we've pushed the boundaries of wormhole theory further than anyone else has done in at least a century, in the process. But it's out there, and for the first time, I'm completely confident we're going to find it."

"Have you mentioned this to anyone else?" Reynaud asked.

"Hardly!" Kare snorted harshly. "After the way those publicity flack idiots went running to the media the last time around?"

"They were just a mite premature," Reynaud conceded.

"A 'mite'?" Kare stared at him incredulously. "They had me sounding like some egotistical, self-seeking crank ready to proclaim he'd discovered the Secrets of the Universe! It took me almost a full T-year to get the record straightened out, and half the delegates to last year's Astrophysics Conference at the Royal Society still seemed to think I was the one who'd written those asinine press releases!"

Reynaud started to say something else, then changed his mind. He could hardly tell Kare he was wrong when he was convinced the physicist was exactly right. That was the main reason Reynaud objected so strenuously to the government's involvement in RMAIA. The work itself was important, even vital, and the funding level required for the dozen or so research ships, not to mention the lab and computer time, certainly left it with a price tag very few private concerns could have afforded. But the entire thing was one huge PR opportunity as far as the current Government was concerned. That was the entire reason they'd created the agency in the first place instead of simply increasing the funding for the Astro Control's Survey Command, which had been quietly pursuing the same research for decades. The RMAIA had been launched with huge fanfare as one of the "long overdue peaceful initiatives" which had been delayed by the war against Haven, but the reality was just a little different from the shiny facade the Government worked so hard to project.

Nothing could have made the calculating reality behind the "peaceful initiative" more obvious than the blatant way the politicos scrambled to make political capital off of the work of the project's scientific staff. Official spokespeople who "forgot" to clear their copy with Kare or Reynaud were bad enough, but at least they could be thumped on for their sins. The project's political overlords, like High Ridge and Lady Descroix, were another matter entirely, and they were the ones who'd really infuriated Kare.

"I agree that we need to keep a lid on this until we have something definite to report," the admiral said after a moment. "I'm guessing that you told your staff people to keep their mouths shut?"

"On the research side, yes," Kare agreed. "The problem is going to come on the funding and administrative side."

Reynaud nodded. The scientists assigned to the project shared Kare's opinions about the PR people almost unanimously. Some of them might even have put it a little stronger than the professor did, in fact. But RMAIA was also awash in paperwork, which was the other main reason Reynaud felt the government would have been better advised to let someone else run it. It had been bad enough in Astro Control, which for all its military rank structure was actually a civil service organization. RMAIA was even worse. Not only did government bureaucrats with perhaps three percent of Dr. Kare's credentials and half that much of his intelligence insist on trying to "direct" his efforts, but they also insisted on exercising a degree of oversight which Reynaud privately estimated had probably doubled the project's time requirements. People who ought to have been attending to research were spending at least fifty percent of their time filling out endless forms, writing and reading memos, and attending administrative conferences that had damn all to do with finding the termini of wormhole junctions. Almost as bad, the project managers were not only scientific ignoramuses; they were also political appointees whose first loyalty was to the politicians who'd given them their prestigious, well-paid jobs. Like Dame Melina Makris, the Exchequer's personal representative on the RMAIA board. Although she was technically in the Countess of New Kiev's department, everyone knew she'd been appointed on the direct nomination of the Prime Minister. Even if there hadn't been any rumors to that effect, Makris herself would have made certain that every soul unfortunate enough to cross her path figured it out. She was officious, overbearing, arrogant, supercilious, and abrasive ... and those, in Michel Reynaud's opinion, were her good points.

But she also knew precisely how the bureaucratic infighting game was played. Better, in fact, than Reynaud himself did. And she had access to all of the agency's paperwork. Which meant that the moment Kare and his scientific team started requesting additional funds for sensor runs, she was going to go running to the Prime Minister—and the public relations department—with the news that Dr. Jordin Kare had once again discovered the ultimate secret of the universe.

In which case, that same Dr. Jordin Kare was going to shoot her. And not just in a kneecap.

"Let me think about it for a day or so, Jordin," Reynaud said after a moment. "There has to be a way to lose the funding in the underbrush." He swiveled his chair gently from side to side, tapping his fingers on his blotter while he thought. "I might be able to get Admiral Haynesworth to help us out," he mused aloud. "She doesn't like bureaucratic interference any more than I do, and she still resents the hell out of having the project stripped away from her own people. She's in the middle of a routine Junction beacon survey right now, too. Maybe I can coax her into letting us have a little bit of her budget for the extra sensor runs we're going to need if we collect her data at the same time."

"Good luck." Kare sounded skeptical.

"It's one possibility." Reynaud shrugged. "I may be able to come up with another. Or, much as I hate to admit it, there may not be any way to skate around it. But I promise I'll do my damnedest, because you're right. This is too important for premature release."

"I'd say that was a fairly generous understatement," Kare said seriously. Then he grinned. "On the other hand, and even granting what a tremendous pain in the ass all of this bureaucratic oversight has been, think about it, Mike. We're about to add another terminus to the Junction. And not one of us—especially not me—has the least damned idea where it leads!"